Measuring Progress

Schenectady Smart City Advisory Commission Roadmap

There are many ways the City of Schenectady plans to measure its success of Smart City initiatives. One way is through the use of what the Advisory Commission has termed our living roadmap that will correlate to the current needs of the community. In early 2016, the following 10 goals were recommended by the Advisory Commission to provide a framework for decision making throughout the evolution of various Smart City projects. As we begin our transition into increasingly interdepartmental collaborations, we keep these goals in mind.

Roadmap Focus

In order to best understand how each of our Smart City initiatives stand up against these goals, we include a roadmap focus chart, which demonstrates how many goals are being focused on throughout the course of the project. The below examples illustrate how the roadmap focus section can be interpreted. In example “A”, all circles with colors correlating to the above 10 roadmap goals have been filled in indicating that project “A” goals focus on all roadmap targets. In example “B”, roadmap goals 3, 6, 7, 8 and 10 have been filled in indicating the corresponding targets of project “B”. It is important to note that the number of goals a project focuses on does not necessarily correlate with the project’s value; it simply identifies which roadmap goals the project is focused on.

Project Status

It is also important to understand the current state a project is in. We have ranked projects in the following way:

Stage 1: The project is currently in a planning phase which may include tasks such as forming partnerships, identifying key goals of the project or performing preliminary work as required.

Stage 2: The project is currently in an execution phase which may include tasks such as carrying out pre-identified phases of a project, overcoming unforeseen hurdles or required planning.

Stage 3: The project is in a completion phase which may include tasks such as monitoring performance, gathering post-project data or submitting documentation to required parties.

​Establishing Universal Targets

Utilizing various reporting methods from recent grant applications and city projects, we have begun to form new visuals that help us identify where our strengths and weaknesses are in terms of full scale Smart City plans. The figure below was one of these visuals formed through universal targets indicated by the Smart Cities Council Grant Challenge. It demonstrates the current readiness of the City by rating Universal Target Areas by “Just Starting”, “Partially Completed”, “Over 50 Percent Completed” and “Completed” (from the inner most part of the circle outward, respectively). This figure splits Smart City Universal Target Areas into seven subdivisions (Security and Privacy, Instrumentation, Connectivity, Computing Resources, Analytics, Data Management and Interoperability) and takes into consideration variables such as publishing privacy rules, implementation progress of optimal city instrumentation, consideration of cloud computing frameworks, understanding current situational awareness, asset optimization, data policies, and progress for prioritizing the use of legacy systems.